New Books from NER Writers: Birds of the Air by David Yezzi

NER Contributor David Yezzi has just released his third book of poems, Birds of the Air. From the review in Publisher’s Weekly:

“Sad and serious, attentive to meter and balance yet no slave to form, the dramatic monologues, rough laments, strict rhymes and accomplished syllabics in this third volume from Yezzi (Azores) go far beyond expectations: it should impress not just those who follow ‘formal’ poetry generally, but almost anyone who has an abiding love for the poetry of Robert Frost. Executive editor of the New Criterion, Yezzi draws carefully on the non- and pre-modernist past: what he adds is, sometimes, a caustic sadness peculiar to his generation, a sense of nothing left, as in a poem on an old photograph: ‘The scribble across/ the back, your name — / if more was meant,/ it never came.'”

Yezzi’s poems have appeared in numerous issues of NER, most recently in 2008 (29.1) and 2009 (30.2).